An idea that cannot be landed is not a good idea.
I believe that in addition to fulfilling the business needs in the work, you will more or less have some innovative ideas of your own.
However, after the sparkling joy of generating ideas, we will find that really pushing the idea to land and completing a “design-driven” project is far from simple as imagined: the business side cannot be persuaded, there are no development resources, and it is delayed again and again. After procrastination, there was no news, and I was forced to embrace the change halfway. I finally went online but the poor data was questioned by all kinds of questions…
The author himself has experienced such setbacks, and once felt suspicious and even self-defeating. Looking back now, I still have more or fewer problems in the business value recognition of the idea itself, time rhythm management, actual effect judgment, etc., which caused various unsuccessful endings.
Business value perception: Does the idea fit the core business goals? Or wishful thinking under cognitive bias?
As a designer who is still in the “entrepreneurial stage” business line, I sometimes envy designers of mature business lines who can spend a lot of time thinking and polishing the design of details such as guide pages, special scenes, animation effects, and like interactions. When I want to promote similar incidents in my responsible business, I am either pressed down by business needs and have no time to think and can only give a “basic solution” that has nothing to do with it, or I have worked hard to diverge and innovate and make a demo. During the development stage, he was helplessly cut due to priority and other issues.
I believe that many people have encountered this situation. Using the boss’s previous words, it’s “not yet at that stage”, and my understanding is: because of our identity as a designer, we have over-enlarged our understanding of some details and innovative ideas. Value evaluation (generating cognitive bias); but they are not business goal-oriented. They contribute little or are even counterproductive to the few data indicators that the business is most concerned about at the current stage. They may be implemented when resources are available, and at other times It is more likely to become our wishful thinking. For products with immature business lines, the latter situation is more common.
A more appropriate approach may be to spend more time with the business side to focus and understand the core business objectives of the product, the current stage, and long-term plans for the future, etc., and collect and analyze the problems and confusion encountered by them and users (I call it It is the “360° research method”), starting from the core goal to propose your own ideas, repeatedly colliding and verifying, and then refining the specific plan after reaching a consensus; instead of preconceived questions and conclusions, seek support based on this argument for opinions, selective filtering of other information, and direct derivation of a complete plan with an unclear method, only to think of colliding with the business side, and the result was challenged to perfection.
A recent revision project that we promoted used the former approach, and the business side expressed their approval and support, and actively strived for the implementation of resource scheduling after the plan was produced; and more than half a year ago, we also used the latter approach to promote Once, the end result was endless challenges and was finally held.
Pursuing design innovation is certainly important, but if you are in a business line with limited resources, please think clearly about these two issues: Does the innovative idea itself have clear enough business value? Can it contribute to the core data indicators of the current business?
Time rhythm management: split priority, the smallest feasible solution, normal iteration
What I said above is to promote ideas in scenarios with limited resources. It is necessary to think clearly about whether the idea itself has enough clear and quantifiable value; and if the development resources are not so tight, the front-end is willing to do it, and some value quantification is relatively difficult to think about the details of creativity, or There is a certain chance of landing, and the management of the time rhythm during the landing process will become more important.
We pay attention to the full link when designing, and we pay attention to multi-angle thinking to give a complete solution. However, in the actual development rhythm, it is often impossible to do it overnight and needs to be divided into multiple steps. This requires us to make a judgment on the priority of specific content function points while giving a plan, and give a minimum feasible plan that has little impact on the basic experience and can be quickly verified online, and then iterates on normal business needs. In the “seeing the needle” (for example, if this business requirement involves a certain page, integrate the experience optimization or innovative ideas related to the certain page), and gradually improve it to a more ideal state.
Judgment of actual effect: Does the technical realization meet the user’s expectations? How does it perform under real data?
As designers, we should have a certain understanding of technology trends. We sometimes try to integrate personalized recommendations, artificial intelligence, AR, etc. into our design plans, but if we don’t have a rough idea of the effect that the technology can ultimately achieve. Judging perception becomes “ideal is full, the reality is very skinny.”
Before, I tried to promote a project with “personalization” as the core strategy, but I missed a very important point: what we are doing is a B-end product with a small basic user level, and the user personality data that can be obtained is very limited. There was a “recommended” module in the previous product, but the actual effect is also a question mark. The product solution designed based on “personalization” looks very good, but in fact, it may only recommend a lot of noise to the user after the line is online. A better approach may not be system recommendation but let users manually customize the selection. In the end, this project was in the development phase for a long time and finally stopped. It was not until later that the core strategy was adjusted and “personalization” was weakened into a small piece of relatively low importance, and it was successfully restarted.
If you just put forward ideas, regardless of the commercial value thinking behind the ideas, technical feasibility judgments, project management promotion, etc., then there is not much difference between us and the unreliable product managers who often complain about “regardless of life”.
Ideas that cannot be landed are not good ideas. Thinking and promoting beyond the limitations of designers can better prove our own value. Everyone encourages everyone~
